When you’re 20 and making your Formula 1 debut, it seems as if your career is stretching out before you. They’ll be opportunities aplenty. It doesn’t matter if your current car isn’t at the front of the grid, you’re young, there’s time to make some mistakes, just bide your time and wait for your big break.
Of course it doesn’t work like that. Opportunities dry up and what was promised to soon be a championship winning car continues to struggle around in 16th. Flavours of the month change quickly. Wasted talent is everywhere in motorsport because pure speed and raw talent is not enough. There’s so much more to being a racing driver with money, luck and being in the right place at the right time all having a massive part to play. But there is no unfulfilled potential mourned quite so much as Fernando Alonso.
There is a strong feeling across much of motorsport that the career of Fernando Alonso is the biggest disappointment of our time. His story is plagued with what-ifs. He is the casualty of his own decisions, constantly hindered not by a lack of talent, but by being the bringer of destruction and internal turmoil. As a result he will finish his career, for the time being at least, as the poster boy for unfulfilled potential. If Alonso himself is unable to learn from his own mistakes at least his time in F1 can live on as a warning to his successors.
Alonso’s choices can be seen reflected in the actions of others on the grid, particularly fellow Spaniard Carlos Sainz Jr. If things had played out differently Sainz could have been in a Red Bull for 2019 but he pushed too hard last year to escape the Red Bull family and hurt his chances. It wasn’t an unreasonable desire to want to leave Toro Rosso when the Max Verstappen/ Daniel Ricciardo partnership looked as if it had the potential to stretch on for years to come.
But in a twist that is all too familiar to Alonso, now with a Red Bull vacancy Toro Rosso is the place to be. And it is relative newcomer Pierre Gasly who seems in line to ascend to the Red Bull throne. Gasly never agitated to go to Renault. Gasly hasn’t got a history of rivalry with Max Verstappen. Sainz is going to fill Alonso’s seat at McLaren in more ways than one.
The comparisons between Daniel Ricciardo’s move to Renault and Lewis Hamilton’s to Mercedes are rife and could be accurate. Still Ricciardo is not the first driver to take a step back and leave a team for another much less likely to guarantee them success. Ricciardo was not content to stay at a team where he would increasingly fall under Verstappen’s shadow and prioritised being the favoured driver over having a winning car. If this plays out in his favour he will look inspired. If not, well, at 29-years-old already it will be a race against time to keep his title hopes alive.
Verstappen himself could benefit from Alonso’s tale of woe. He shoved his way into Red Bull in 2016 and has proved himself to have a ruthless streak on and off the track. In this case, it proved a success. A win first time out meant there was no looking back for the young Dutchman but if things had gone differently… As it is it’s a success story for everyone except the now all-but-forgotten Danil Kvyat who was on the podium two races before. It’s a harsh world.
If Pierre Gasly does indeed get the 2019 Red Bull promotion then Verstappen will become the de facto team leader and it will be interesting to see how their relationship develops. Will Verstappen, still only 21 himself, become the clear number one?
The appearance of being hard to work with can be fatal to an F1 driver’s career. Both Paul di Resta and Pascal Werhlein suffered from the perception that they were somehow difficult to work with. Anecdotally this impacted their short F1 careers and meant that despite initially being viewed as rising stars they were never able to progress up the grid.
Of course it is unreasonable to suggest that drivers shouldn’t push to be in the best seat possible, or never clash with their team-mate. It’s natural and necessary and a hallmark of the very best. Someone with a settled mindset as a number two driver is never going to find it within themselves to suddenly fight for a championship. The desire to win, the need to win has to be there. A driver cannot be content merely to show up. A driver does not deserve to be able to just show up in F1 if they haven’t the desire to win.
But that doesn’t mean that being easy to work with isn’t rewarded with opportunities. Bridges should not be burnt too quickly, opportunities should not be treated so recklessly. Alonso’s downfall stemmed from an arrogance that opportunities would last forever because he was one of the best but that’s not true. There comes a time when teams turn their backs on ageing, divisive drivers for shiny new ones with no baggage.
Many drivers have used being agreeable and unproblematic to their advantage. Looking at the drivers with the longest F1 careers, it is the more easygoing that top the list. It is the Rubens Barrichellos of this world that remain on the grid long after their superstar contemporaries have shone bright and retired. It is the Jenson Buttons and the Felipe Massas. All good drivers, all popular people and all unlikely to be talked about as the stars of their generations.
Arguably it is Kimi Raikkonen, a cult-figure of rebelling against the conventions of F1, who has best played this tactic. Would he still be at Ferrari, age 38, five years since his last win, if he wasn’t so easy to work with? Raikkonen is the antithesis of Alonso. He does his job, avoids any politics and goes home. And as such he’s managed to inhabit one of the most sought-after seats in motorsport for five years. There’s much to be said of being apolitical.
So how does an ambitious F1 driver make sure they are always in the best position to win, with the team working with the unanimous goal of making them champion? On reflection it seems that Sebastian Vettel might be closest to the answer. Like Michael Schumacher before him, Vettel moulds the team to fit his needs, but he also brings much-needed motivation and inspiration into the garage. He’s even learnt Italian in his desire to be Ferrari’s next golden one. He realises that the team wins and loses together and doesn’t spend his time publicly criticising the team. It’s a far cry from Alonso dragging Honda through the mud at every opportunity.
Just demanding that the team do better is not enough. Often the secret behind the best drivers is all the work that goes on behind the scenes. Alonso is a political sledgehammer. His reputation is for destabilising teams as a divisive central figure as opposed to uniting a team towards a common goal. Alonso leaves a trail of wreckage wherever he goes. At McLaren the first time, where the threat of a faster team-mate led to implosion, at Ferrari where the team deteriorated under his tenure and, most interestingly, at McLaren the second time around.
In this scenario McLaren invested a huge amount in Alonso. It pinned its hope of resurgence on a combination of Honda and Alonso-fever. When it failed to find the performance it had been looking for and Honda took the blame, Alonso became even more intrinsical to McLaren’s future. He showed who had the upper hand in the relationship when Indycar, Daytona and World Endurance Championship appearances were supported when just years before they would have been refused.
Gil de Ferran, a friend of Alonso’s, joined McLaren in recent months as Eric Boullier took the fall for the chaos of the past four years. By the time Alonso announced his intention not to race in F1 in 2019 he had a team perfectly cultivated to meet his own preferences, all except from a car capable of winning him a championship or even so much as a race.
Alonso’s desperation to be the entire focus of a team left him without a competitive team. He’s abandoning the sinking ship, with the caveat that he may board again once it comes afloat.
He might have had the potential to be a seven-time champion, but he lives as a warning that potential is worth nothing if unfulfilled.
